N.J.'s sick pay scam for public employees must end

Doug Bauman/For The Jersey JournalSen. Nicholas Sacco is shown in this June file photo.

Brace yourself, because this is the kind of story that can make you so crazy you may pop a blood vessel.

We give you state Sen. Nicholas Sacco, the political boss of North Bergen, a man so shameless that he makes the other politicians look like selfless and decent fellows.

Sacco, a Democrat, has three public jobs that bring him a combined salary of $299,000. That should be criminal in itself, but Sacco and his pals in Trenton have blocked one governor after another as they have tried to ban this kind of slurping at the public trough.

We all knew about that part. What’s new, as The Star-Ledger’s Jarrett Renshaw reported yesterday, is that Sacco has accumulated $332,000 in unused sick time. If he retires tomorrow, that’s what he’s entitled to take from his local taxpayers — the regular middle-class folks he claims to faithfully represent.

"Is that fair to people?" Sacco asks. “Maybe not, but that is the contract that existed.”
Give him this much: He won’t pretend this is justifiable. But he does pretend that it’s not his fault, that the rules of the game were somehow thrust upon him.

Please. Sacco is a key player in Trenton, where these rules are made. That’s because he controls politics in North Bergen, where he is the mayor, the assistant superintendent and the state senator. He decides who runs for which office. He controls the local patronage. His machine churns out votes so decisively that other bosses are envious.

New Jersey laws on sick pay are crazy. In the private sector, sick pay protects us from losing income when we are ill. That has morphed into a cash entitlement in most New Jersey towns, thanks to the power of unions. A few years back, four retiring cops in Parsippany walked away with a combined $900,000.

Maybe it’s unfair to pick on Sacco. Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, also a Democrat, collects an annual pension of $69,000 on top of his salary, while he’s still working. He might get another $60,000 in sick pay, but promises he won’t take more than $26,000. Imagine the sacrifice.

Gov. Chris Christie wants to end this, but the sad fact is that taking back benefits that were promised by contract is illegal. The governor is overreaching on that point.

But we can at least change the rules, starting now, so that there will never again be a case like Sacco’s.

The governor’s position on that is straightforward — no more cash for sick time. On that point, he is absolutely right.

Democrats are resisting. They have moved in his direction, thanks to his clubbing them over the head on this issue for months. Still, the dithering goes on, and thousands of public employees continue to build up benefits.

Our hope is that Christie keeps clubbing Democrats until they submit.

The governor’s spokesman, Michael Drewniak, got it exactly right when he was asked about Sacco.